Press Release

Press Release: The Roswell Slides Research Group

The Roswell Slides Research Group is an ad hoc group of about 20 UFO researchers and skeptics from all walks of life and five countries who came together critically evaluate claims being made about the so-called “Roswell Slides,” which were purported by their promoters to show the body of a dead alien who crashed near Roswell in 1947. Some very enterprising work has now been done by one member of the Roswell Slides Research Group (“Nab Lator”). He used commercial software, SmartDeblur (written by Vladimir Yuzhikov, making use of an image processing technique known as blind deconvolution”), to significantly clear up the blurred text. Other members of the Group offered some suggestions and helped narrow down the actual words.

Following a bit of work by various members of the team over a period of a few hours, an item was posted on the Blue Blurry Lines blog setting out some of the initial results. (The words “MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY“ were clear, with 3 further lines of text seeming to say something like:

“At the time of burial the body was clothed in a xxx-xxx cotton shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of these small cotton blankets. Loaned by Mr. Xxxxxx, San Francisco, California”)

This work provoked fierce denials from the promoters of the Roswell Slides. Their website quickly responded with allegations that the de-blurring work of the Roswell Slides Research Group was a fake – claiming, for example, that, “The image they claim to have de-blured is its self [sic] a fake created by taking a low resolution copy of our scan and editing it in photoshop”.

Again within hours, instructions were posted online in the form of videos and step-by-step instructions which allowed anyone to duplicate the relevant de-blurring using material on the website of the promoters of the slides. Various other researchers have now duplicated those results and accepted them as genuine. The key question that remains is how the text was not clear to the promoters of the slides before their event was held in Mexico City on May 5th, and whether the actions of those few individuals will do lasting damage to the wider field of UFO research.